UPDATED: Twiggle – Google takes over Twitter?

Known business investing website released a rumor that Google is going to take over micro-blogging giant Twitter. It looks like the search giant is afraid of the competition in the personal data/interest gathering business…

An article on TechCrunch says that two different sources confirmed this and that the negotiations have been taking place for quite some time and they may be in the final stage. In any case the companies are negotiating. What will the price for this acquisition will be? We don’t know at this moment, but it is known that Twitter turned down an offer to be acquired by Facebook just a few months ago. The pricetag there was set at around half a billion dollars. The assumption in this case is that Google’s offer is much, much more generous.

If you’re wondering why would Google even want Twitter, the answer actually lies dead ahead. Twitter became the best real-time database with excellent search options, opening up millions and millions of users that are discussing about everything. Twitter is nothing short of a gold mine for Google’s advertising business that heavily relies on following what people search for. Twitter popularity and dramatically expanding user number makes this potentiall deal a no brainer.

We all know what kind of money lies in advertising on search engines… and Google wants to cut the competition in a smart way, by purchasing smaller players – rather than Microsoft’s catastrophical failure called "Microhoo" that went boo-hoo.

Still, the discussions between Twitter and Google continue and it is obvious that Google desperately wants that real time feed of Twitter updates to speed-up its indexing. Without that feed Google must independently index each Twitter user periodically to look for updates and that is slowing the process and cost a lot of money. Will Google get what he wants, or will Twitter realize what kind of gold mine it has, we’ll just have to wait and see.